Life on Mars

The news this week reports a theory which has recently emerged that some of the key components for life on earth may have originated on Mars. The short short version is this: We think life began around 3.5 Billion years ago. We think that life (RNA anyway) could only have been created in the presence of highly oxidized molybdenum and boron which apparently weren’t around on earth at the time. Guess where they WERE around? MARS

What if life DID exist on Mars long before even the seeds of life on earth began to germinate? What if, like the legends of Rapa Nui, a civilisation of pre-human Martians outgrew their planet’s ability to sustain their own bloated existence. What if the Martians used up all their resources and became the ultimate victims of their own evolutionary success. What if hiding deep under all those red rocks there are giant monolithic clues to the doomed Martian society waiting to be found?

THAT’S CRAZY!

Is it?… let’s say it happened.. Let’s say that a Martian civilisation grew much like life on Earth is growing now. The Pre-Humans dominated and bred and within a few thousand years their sheer numbers started to put on strain on their planet’s ability to sustain them. They try austerity, population control but at a global level it’s just not possible to get a single political consensus. Eventually, as resources become scarcer and scarcer, conflict emerges and becomes all out world war. What weapons do the Martians possess? Even if they only lasted as long as people on Earth have NOW, odds are they could make the same military advances we have.. And after the war.. after all is blown apart on Mars, the atmosphere destroyed, the climate wiped out, the water all but gone.. all that remains are the basic chemical building blocks of life carried to Earth on a meteorite…

Then 3.5 BILLION years later, the surface of Mars contains no trace that life ever existed at all, and life evolved from those Martian specks has become the human race. The dominant species begins the same self destructive story…unless somehow we evolve beyond our very own nature…

The legend of Rapa Nui has always fascinated me. It’s a lesson that we seem to be failing to learn. Many people think the Easter island story is a metaphor for the whole of Earth.. maybe the real metaphor is Mars.